The Microbes Crawling Around in Your Mouth Might Be Helping to Power Your Brain
I've spent years chasing alien implants and lake monsters, and now I'm supposed to get worked up about the germs in my own gob? It's honestly the most unsettling thing I've heard all month. The idea that my tongue is running a miniature chemical plant that keeps my brain from fainting is both humbling and vaguely insulting. I always assumed my neurons ran on coffee and spite, not on the quiet labor of bacteria that I'm actively trying to kill with mouthwash.
What gets me is the specificity of the pipeline. The bacteria convert nitrates to nitrites, which then help regulate cerebral blood flow. So that brain fog you feel after a heavy meal might actually be a shortage of nitrite-producing microbes. I'd want to know if certain mouthwashes are starving people's brains, because that would be a scandal worthy of this paper's front page.
I land on this: we've been treating our mouths like a war zone when it's really a delicate ecosystem that's been doing our thinking for us. Maybe the government knew all along, but that's probably just my paranoia talking. Either way, I'm keeping my toothbrush close and my nitrates closer.